HEGELS MASTER AND SLAVE DIALECTIC

IN THE WORK OF LACAN

Franois Regnault

What Lacan borrows quite willingly from Hegel, whom he often quotes,1 is the master/slave
dialectic, which he makes use of in the service of psychoanalysis. At first, one may be surprised by this,
as there are no longer any slaves, and, if we are to believe him, there are no more masters either: what
happens between the discourse of the classical master and that of the modern master, which is called
capitalist, is a modification in the place of knowledge.2
Philosophical tradition would have a responsibility in such a transmutation: What remains is
indeed, in effect, the essence of the master, namely, that he does not know what he wants. There you
have what constitutes the true structure of the discourse of the master. The slave knows lots of things,
but what he knows even better still is what the master wants, even if the latter does not know it, which is
the usual case, for without that he would not be a master. The slave knows it, and that is what his
function as slave is. It is also for this [reason] that it works, for, all the same, it has worked for a fair while.
The fact that the all-knowledge has moved into the place of the master is something that, far from
throwing light on it, obscures a bit more what is in question, namely, truth.3
All this is obviously derived from Hegel.
The Dialectic of Master and Slave in Hegel
After having run through these forms of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, that sensecertainty, perception, force and understanding are, one arrives at what Hegel calls self-consciousness,
about which he says: With self-consciousness, we have entered upon the native ground of the truth.4
(p.146 French) With it, the categories of life and desire are deduced. One then discovers that Selfconsciousness is in-itself and for-itself when and because it is in-itself and for-itself for another selfconsciousness, that is to say, it can only be such qua being recognised.5 Three moments are
distinguished:
1o For self-consciousness there is another self-consciousness.6
Dialectic between each consciousness and its alterity,
2o The struggle between two consciousnesses: the trial by death, which
renders apparent the essential character of life, but at the cost of one
becoming the slave of the other, the master (in German Meister, and
Knecht, which at the same time signifies slave and valet).
3o The master/slave dialectic proper.
Roughly put, this dialectic passes through the following moments:
a
Thing
object of desire

Master 1o
2o
b
b

a
Slave
Consciousness

The master is the consciousness which is for itself, and no longer only the concept of this
consciousness albeit through the mediation of an other which demands to make a whole, a
synthesis with Being, the thing in general. The master is related to this consciousness and this thing,
object of desire. The master is thus first of all immediately consciousness (1o), then mediation which is
only through the other (2o) - and is then related, Hegel says: a) immediately at the two moments, b)
medially at each moment by the means of the other. Indeed, the master is medially related to the slave
by the intermediary of the independent being (the thing that is in between, the stake: life, work) - but

similarly he is related medially to the thing by means of the slave; the slave behaves negatively with
respect to the thing and, in truth, suppresses it, he therefore only transforms it through his work.
Conversely, for the lord the immediate relation becomes through this mediation the sheer negation of
the thing, or the enjoyment of it; that which is not carried out through desire is carried out through the
enjoyment of the lord: to do away with the thing: assuagement in enjoyment[]. The aspect of its
independence he leaves to the bondsman, who works on it. In both of these moments the lord achieves
his recognition through another consciousness.6 A recognition that is one-sided and unequal. At the
same time, what the bondsman does is really the action of the lord, but ineffectively, in that he does
nothing else but imitates the master, for whom the thing also was nothing[ness]. What therefore lacks in
order for recognition (equality) to be effective is that the master does to himself what he does to the other
individual, that the slave does to the master what he does to himself. That the master may become the
slave of the slave, and the slave, the master of the master, as Hyppolite says.7
Here, one will go no further than this first great phase, which Hyppolite calls domination, and
which will be followed by fear, and then by culture or formation, (das Bilden), of the individual, until the
conflictual process, resolved, reaches the superior stage of thought (stoicism, scepticism, unhappy
consciousness).
In the place of a simple dialectic in which one would pose A, defined in opposition to non-A,
and in which A and non-A, opposed to each other would pass into each other, B being the result of A
plus non-A one now has the following dialectic: M (master) holds T (thing) to turn it into a stake
[enjeu] against S (slave), and at the same time M depends on S to access T. A relation is then knotted
between, on the one side, S and T, and on the other side, T and S, at the end of which the result of one
of the two sides is effected in its turn on M, while M effects in his turn the result on the other side, etc.
One only reaches the supposed synthesis of the moments through inequalities, unilateralities,
asymmetries, and recognition is constantly deferred.8 In this, Hegel therefore very directly inspires the
whole Lacanian problematic of desire and jouissance, of the Thing and being, of consciousness and the
other.
As for the master and the slave, how can this dialectic be inscribed in the Freudian Field? There
is no doubt that, here, one should introduce the difference between respective readings of the
phenomenology and of Hegels system in general, by Alexandre Kojve and by Jean Hyppolite.
In a few words, for Hyppolite, the phenomenology designates a field in which one describes the
things as they appear to a consciousness. It is the relation of spirit to itself as phenomenon, as is
indicated by the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences.9
On this topic, one must distinguish between two states of the doctrine:

1)

2)

In 1807, the Phenomenology of Spirit is presented as the first part of the System of Science10 and
as a Science of the Experience of Consciousness.11 The order followed at the time is:
Consciousness, Self-consciousness, Reason, Spirit, Religion, Absolute Knowledge. The Preface
indicates that the task is to lead the individual from his ignorant state to knowledge.12 The dialectic
of consciousness leads this individual to the State, Religion, Philosophy, Universal History.

In the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (the first edition of which is dated 1817), there is a
part proper to consciousness ( 413 to 439), but the Spirit is first the object of a psychology and
thus leaves phenomenology ( 440 to 482, subjective spirit), before becoming the objective Spirit
(the State. 483 to 552), then the Absolute Spirit (art, religion, philosophy, 553 to the end).
What the Phenomenology of Spirit is about, as Hyppolite remarks, is the spontaneous development of
an experience as it gives itself to consciousness and as the latter gives itself to the former.13 History is
deduced only after this, but in this Phenomenology of Spirit, we are not in real History. Hence then the
pointed absence of proper names and the allusive treatment of figures. Thus, one recognises Antigone in
the brother/sister dialectic in Chapter VI, although she is not named. We are as in the reflexive element
of allusion.
As for Kojve, he in a way realised the system. For him, with the master/slave dialectic, one
enters history: If then, at the start, in the given World the slave had a fearful nature and had to submit
to the master, to the strong man, it does not mean that this will always be the case. Thanks to his work,
he can become other; and, thanks to his work, the World can become other. And this is what actually
took place, as universal history and, finally, the French Revolution and Napoleon show. This creative
education of Man by work (Bildung) creates History, i.e., human Time..14 Kojves position is however
not necessarily that of Hegel: Independently of what Hegel thinks, the Phenomenology is a philosophical
anthropology. Its theme is man as human, the real being in History. Its method is phenomenological in

the modern sense of the word. This anthropology is thus neither a psychology, nor an ontology. It wants
to describe the integral Essence of man.15
And, while Hyppolite follows all the forms of consciousness by granting to each of them its
relative importance, Kojve may assert: In fact, then, we can say this: Man was born and History began
with the first fight that ended in the appearance of a Master and a Slave. That is to say that Man at his
origin is always either Master or Slave; and that true man can exist only where there is a Master and
a Slave []. And universal history, the history of the interaction between men and of their interaction with
Nature, is the history of the interaction between warlike Masters and working Slaves. Consequently,
History stops at the moment when the difference, the opposition between Master and Slave
disappears.Now, according to Hegel, it is in and by the wars of Napoleon, and, in particular, the Battle
of Jena, that this completion of History is realised through the dialectical overcoming (Aufheben) of both
the Master and the Slave.16
It is clear that nothing quite so determined can be read in Hegel, and that the extension of the
master/slave dialectic to the whole of human history is a forcing by Kojve. But such a daring reading
could seduce the audience in the 1930s.
The citizen is thus the synthesis of the master and the slave. History is dead, and Hegel is its
undertaker.
What results is that Kojve:
a) always returns to the master/slave dialectic, according to him the principal matrix of the
Phenomenology.
b) extends his developments on the desire of the Other, intersubjectivity, to nearly all of the
Phenomenology, rather than stopping on each form of consciousness proper: Desire is
human - or, more exactly, humanising, anthropogenetic - only provided that it is directed
toward another Desire (for the thing). To be human, man must act not for the sake of
subjugating a thing, but for the sake of subjugating another Desire (for the thing).17
c) develops to too great an extent chapter VIII on absolute knowledge.
In Lacans Work
It is known that Lacan started by attending Kojves lectures, between 1933 and 1939, at the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes. Then he must have read Hyppolites thesis, Genesis and Structure of the
Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1946, and the translation of the book itself, published the following
year, in 1947.
In Kojve, Lacan must have, first of all, found a kind of master (although the only one he really
names as his master is Clrambault). From this mention in the Note sur la causalit psychique from
1946: The Soul of the world, that he (Kojve) recognised in Napoleon,18 until this homage in Seminar
XVII, in 1970: Me for example, I may never have encountered Kojve. If I had never encountered him, it
is highly likely that, like all French people educated in a certain period, I would never have suspected that
The Phenomenology of Spirit was something.19 As well as in LEtourdit in 1972: Kojve, whom I
consider to be my master, for having initiated me to Hegel, had the same bias towards mathematics. []
This contempt, which was his, sustained his discourse from the beginning which was also where he
returned: The senior officer knew how to treat the buffoons as well as others, namely as the subjects,
which they are, of the sovereign.20
As in the work of Kojve, Lacan therefore grants a privilege to the master/slave dialectic and to
absolute knowledge (as well as to the ruse of reason, the law of the heart and the delusion of
presumption): The ruse of reason, subtle form through which Hegel made it [the question of truth] idle,
but at the cost of disturbing those ruses (one should read the political writings), which are merely dressed
up as reason.21
However, it is difficult to know what he searches for, or, rather, what he finds in Hegel, about
whom he is apparently nearly always enthusiastic, although he ends up proclaiming that there is never
any synthesis, nor absolute knowledge, nor ruse of reason, as this change of direction about dialectical
progress testifies to: In 1950, in Fonctions de la psychanalyse en criminologie: Dialectic provides the
unconscious law of the formations, even the most archaic ones, of the adaptation apparatus, thus
confirming Hegels gnoseology which formulates the law generating reality in the process: thesis,
antithesis, synthesis.22
But, at the other end, in 1973: Plenitude of dialectised contrasts in the idea of historical
progression of which it should be said that nothing for us testifies to the substance.23

Let us follow the landmarks of this evolution, itself dialectical:

Recognition and Intersubjectivity:
In Ecrits, on the subject of aggressivity in psychoanalysis, in 1948, he says of Darwin: Before Darwin,
however, Hegel provided the ultimate theory of the proper function of aggressivity in human ontology,
seeming to prophecy the iron law of our time. From the conflict of master and slave, he deduced the
entire subjective and objective progress of our history, revealing in these crises the syntheses to be
found in the highest forms of the status of the person in the West, from Stoic to the Christian, and even to
the future citizen of the Universal State. [] If, in the conflict of master and slave, it is the recognition of
man by man that is involved, it is also promulgated on a radical negation of natural values, whether
expressed in the sterile tyranny of the master or in the productive tyranny of labour. We all know what an
armature this profound doctrine has given to the constructive Spartacism of the Slave recreated by the
barbarism of the Darwinian century.24
In 1953, in Discours de Rome, within the framework of what Lacan calls the dialectic of selfconsciousness, such that it is realised from Socrates to Hegel. These remarks define the limits within
which it is impossible for our technique to fail to recognise the structuring moments of the Hegelian
phenomenology: in the first place the master-slave dialectic, or the dialectise of the belle me and of the
law of the heart, and generally whatever enables us to understand how the constitution of the objects is
subordinated to the realisation of the subject. But if there still remains something prophetic in Hegels
insistence on the fundamental identity of the particular and the universal, an insistence that reveals the
measure of his genius, it is certainly psychoanalysis that provides it with its paradigm by revealing the
structure in which that identity is realised as disjunctive of the subject, and without any appeal to
tomorrow.25 Indeed, according to Lacan, this division of the subject concerns in the same movement
the individual and the collective.
In 1953-54, in Seminar I, this essential text where Hegels myth is no longer the essential law of
human becoming, but rather the law of the imaginary. The structure of the imaginary is separated from
itself: namely, between a and a, the specular relation.26 The allusion to Hegel fits here within a
development on intersubjectivity: Lacan takes up the example of the perverse relation between the
narrator and Albertine in Proust. The limit of this structure is a fatal relation structured by the following
two abysses either desire is extinguished, or the object disappears. That is why, at every turn, I take
my bearings from the master-slave dialectic27 The thesis put forward is the following: The masterslave relation is a limit-example, because, to be sure, the imaginary register in which it is deployed
appears only at the limit of our experience. The analytic experience is not a total one. It is defined on
another plane than that of the imaginary the symbolic plane.28
Alienation:
To summarise, 1) Hegel would here give the law of the imaginary. 2) The dialectic would designate the
drama that the desire of man is the desire of the Other. (Dialectic, which in Plato is dialogue and ascent,
in Aristotle, apparent reasoning, in Kant, necessary illusion, is, in Hegel, founded on the principle of
contradiction: A = non-A. In Lacan, the dialectic culminates in alienation.) 3) The law of the
intersubjective relation takes place between the imaginary and the symbolic, between work and
jouissance. A correlation is further indicated with a clinical interpretation: the slave as obsessional
neurotic.
In Discours de Rome of 1953, on this topic, the mechanism of alienation is already in place.
There is a forced choice of Work, which I must make and which does not belong to me. The text, which
brings together the whole problematic, deserves to be quoted in its entirety: This meaning [sens] is
sustained (in the obsessional) by his subjective relation to the master in so far as it is the masters death
for which he waits. In fact, the obsessional subject manifests one of the attitudes that Hegel did not
develop in his dialectic of the master and slave. The slave has given way in face of the risk of death in
which mastery was being offered to him in a struggle of pure prestige. But since he knows that he is
mortal, he also knows that the master can die. From this moment on he is able to accept his labouring for
the master and his renunciation of pleasure [jouissance] in the meantime; and, in this uncertainty of the
moment when the master will die, he waits. Such in the intersubjective reason, as much for the doubt as
for the procrastination that are character traits of the obsessional subject. In the meantime, all his labour
falls under the heading of this intention, and becomes doubly alienating by this fact. For not only is the
subjects handiwork taken from him by another which is the constituting relation of all labour but the
subjects recognition of his own essence in his handiwork, in which this labour finds its justification, also

eludes him, for he himself is not in it. He is in the anticipated moment of the masters death, from which
moment he will begin to live, but in the meantime he identifies himself with the master as dead, and as a
result of this he is himself already dead.29
The same reference in the same year in Variantes de la cure-type: The imaginary formation,
navely objectivised by psychologists as synthetic function of the ego, rather shows the condition which
opens it to the alienating master/slave dialectic.30
In 1954-55, in Seminar II, a step seems to have been made: energy, the machine are presented
as the true revolution rather than Napoleon and his Battle of Jena. Explicit critique of Hegel, and implicit
of Kojve, all the more so as Lacan engages in a dialogue with Hyppolite in this session. I think that
according to Hegel, everything is always there, all of history is always actually present, vertically so.
Otherwise, it would be a childish tale. And the thing with absolute knowledge, which indeed is here, ever
since the first Neanderthal idiots, is that discourse closes in on itself, whether or not it is in complete
disagreement with itself, whether or not everything which can be expressed in the discourse is coherent
and justified. Hegel is at the limit of anthropology. Freud got out of it. His discovery is that man is not
entirely in man. Freud is not a humanist.31
A few more landmarks: in Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire, there is a
reference to absolute knowledge: I say its philosophical pertinence, for such, in the last resort, is the
schema Hegel gave us of History in The Phenomenology of Spirit. The resort to Hegel is somewhat
attenuated: Hence, let it be noted, my entirely didactic reference to Hegel, by which I wished to say
something, for the purposes of the training that I have in mind, about the question of the subject, in so far
as that question is properly subverted by psychoanalysis.32
In Position of the Unconscious, Lacan criticises Hegel in favour of Descartes: And the much
sought after [recherche] latency of this founding moment, as Selbstbessusstsein [self-consciousness],
in the dialectical sequence of Hegels phenomenology of mind, is based upon the presupposition of
absolute knowledge. Everything, on the contrary, points to the distribution of consciousness in psychical
reality however the latters texture is ordered consciousness being heterotopic in terms levels and
erratic at each level.33 And the issue then: The negation [dngation] inherent in psychology in this
regard should rather, following Hegel, be chalked up to the law of the heart and the delusion of
presumption.34
Here Lacan has given up on synthesis, on absolute knowledge, on consciousness itself as being
an imaginary concept. On this, he will say that there is never any synthesis.
From now on, he places the emphasis on knowledge, S2, rather than on Work. On the subject of
alienation, he acknowledges in Seminar XI, from 1964: It is in Hegel that I have found a legitimate
justification for the term alienating vel. What does Hegel mean by it? To cut a long story short, it
concerns the production of the primary alienation, that by which man enters into the way of slavery. Your
freedom or your life! If he chooses freedom, he loses both immediately if he chooses life, he has life
deprived of freedom.35
Hence the idea of a deception: the Master has not really risked death, and thus, nor did the
slave. Yet Hegel does not thematise this choice as such, but rather the idea of an Aufhebung, where
nothing is really suppressed, because of repression, nor preserved, because of the transformation of the
terms. The master has two deaths, that of pure prestige, which he avoided, and that which he will have in
the end, which for Hegel corresponds to an access to thought. While Lacan would stop Hegels dialectic
on a form of consciousness, without moving on to the next one, by the recourse to Eulers circles, which
characterise alienation and separation, and to the object a which falls out. Thus the figure of Sygne de
Cofontaine of Claudel: his forced choice (to lose the Pope or to commit perjury) is blocked and
paralyses her for ever. The Pope is saved, certainly, but she has lost everything. The dialectic does not
go any further.
Discourses:
U
S2 a
S1
$

S1 S2
$
a

M
a

S2

$ S1

H
S2

a$
S1

The relation to knowledge, S2, takes a new turn when Lacan no longer wants to make the Hegelian
approach the key of the imaginary, or the law of intersubjectivity, or the operation of alienation, but a
discourse.
He then thinks the modern master while witnessing the events of May 1968. Seminar XVII, thus,
in a sense, substitutes discourse for the imaginary.
In the discourse that I call of the master, it is simply the teacher, the legislator (Lycurgue, as he
sometimes dares to call himself), who supports the law, this law of which it is amazing that one can say
that its ignorance is no excuse, since it is the teacher himself. And he adds: it is in this spirit that Hegel
persuades the slave that, by working, he will reach the absolute through his knowledge, that the empire
of the master will be his own empyrean: he can reach this Sunday of lifeThe knowledge coming in the
place of the agent, it is the quarter of a turn from which Charlemagne, let us say, institutes the discourse
of the university. (Clture du Congrs de lEcole Freudienne de Paris on 19th April 1970).36
What is a discourse? A certain number of stable relations inside which there is something that is
much larger, that goes much further than the effective enunciations. Through the tool of language,37
the ordering is done between the following, well known propositions:
A1 The unconscious is structured like a language (S, $).
A2 The signifier represents the subject for another signifier (S1, S2, $).
A3 The subject is in internal exclusion to its object (object a).
The following suggestion forms itself here since there are four places to characterise,
perhaps each of the four permutations could yield us, from within itself, the place that stands out the
most to constitute a step forward in an order of discovery that is nothing other than the one called
structure.38
According to subtle variations following the proportion a/b = c/d, the places are: master-signifier
above subject in relation to knowledge above jouissance, where one will find the master, the subject, the
slave and the surplus-value respectively; then desire above truth in relation to the Other above loss; and,
finally, agent above truth in relation to the other above production. The four configurations of S1, S2, $
and a in these four places will give birth to the discourses of the master, the university, the hysteric and
the analytical discourse respectively. One will refer to the formulae of the four discourses.39
Therefore, the main point is that todays master is knowledge. This is what, in a sense, defines
the modern world: Except that what has to be understood in this schema as was already indicated
when in the discourse of the master S2 was put in the place of the slave, and when in the discourse of
the modernised master it was then put in the place of the master , it is that it is not the same
knowledge.40 Indeed, in the discourse of the master of Antiquity, knowledge is in the place of the other,
the slave, while in that of the modern master, it is in the position of agent, which turns it into a form of the
discourse of the university. But is there not something fishy about this? Is it not difficult to reconcile this
with the idea that Science, which rules the modern world, is the negation of systems of knowledge, as
Lacan remarks concerning the Cartesian doubt?
The solution lies in the fact that it is not the same knowledge that the one[s] Descartes pushed
aside, than modern knowledge, now implicating that science is in a way the new master which causes
the discontents of civilisation. The dominant discourse is articulated as follows:
S2 a place of the slave
S1
$ product of consummation
Science functions therefore as knowledge of the master (capitalist, for example). It is the new
tyranny of knowledge.41 (Unconscious) knowledge is now in the place of truth only in the discourse
ordered by pure loss, to wit, the analytical discourse. And this is what Hegel seems to have perceived:
There, in the last discourse on the right, what place is he in? In the place that in the discourse of the
master Hegel, the most sublime hysteric, designates for us as being that of truth.42 Because he located
the place of truth under the master, and because he believed he could thus, progressively, reach
absolute knowledge, Hegel then prefigures something of the analytical discourse. But at the same time,
[the discourse] eludes the distinction that would enable to be perceived the fact that if this historical
machine, which is in fact only the progress of the schools and nothing more, ever ended in absolute
knowledge, this would only be to mark the annulment, the failure, the disappearance at the end-point of
what alone motivates the function of knowledge its dialectic with jouissance. Absolute knowledge
would purely and simply be the abolition of this end-point. Whoever studies the text of Phenomenology
closely can be left in no doubt about this.43 What Lacan precisely calls the hysteria of discourse. The
hysteric would have looked for a master to the point of absolute knowledge, in order to, once there,

dominate him: to reduce his jouissance through the reabsorption, in a way, of the surplus-enjoyment
(object a).
Summary
With the master/slave dialectic, Lacan has thus tried successively to think:
the limit of intersubjectivity and the dividing law of the imaginary.
the alienation of the subject.
the other side of psychoanalysis (or the discontents of civilisation).
In the end, the imaginary, , appearances, to speak like Parmenides,44 doxa,
opinion, are reduced to a simple term, a circle, like the one of the symbolic and like that of the real
indistinguishable in a knot.
After 1970, the Lacanian thesis of antiphilosophy, applied to Hegel if one really wishes to, would
not signify a rupture with Hegel, but the Aufhebung of the discourse of the most sublime of hysterics: the
philosopher turned professor, the modern destiny of philosophy.
One can thus note that Hegel has occupied nearly every place (like Socrates, incidentally).
Hegel putting in the place of what orders the process, successively or alternately: S1, as master (in
philosophy), or S2 as knowledge (absolute), or $, as hysteric (the most sublime), or even a, when, as
analyst (hysterical!), he knows how to locate knowledge in the place of truth (that which is thematised in
effect in the Phenomenology of Spirit).
It is precisely about jouissance, that Lacan poses what is perhaps his last Hegelian question:
This is what we have to interrogate now. S, is it a hole, R, ex-sistence, I, consistency? These categories
are not easy to handle. They have, however, left some traces in history. It is from a traditional
philosophical extenuation, the summit of which is given to us by Hegel, that something has surged up
under the name of a Kierkegaard [] Think of this bringing out of repetition as more fundamental in
experience than the resolution thesis/antithesis/synthesis on which Hegel was weaving history.45 Was
Hegels mistake to get rid of jouissance by misrecognising repetition? Since, as Lacan says: the
measure of this function is to be found in jouissance.46
But the fact is that if philosophy does not ignore jouissance, differing in this from psychoanalysis,
it rather finds a way of losing nothing of it. Instead of jouissance being faced with its loss, or with the
hole, or even with the mortal insistence of repetition, it is rather returned to its perenity. May we say that
it is no longer the same jouissance? Is there pure loss only for psychoanalysis? The proof? It lies in the
last word of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences47: The idea [of philosophy], Hegel says, being
eternally in and for itself, is manifested, engendered, and enjoys [geniet] itself eternally as absolute
spirit.
Translated by Vronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf
1. At a guess: more than twenty times in Ecrits, even more in Seminars I, II, VII, XX, in Scilicet No
1, 2/3 and 4, and more in Ornicar? No 4, 5, 17/18, 26/27, 28, 32, Hegel is quoted from one end
to the other in the teaching of Lacan.
2. J. Lacan, Le Seminaire XVII, p.34 (English translation is by Russell Grigg).
3. Ibid.
4. G. W. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. A. V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977, Ch. IV:
The Truth and Self-Certainty, p.104.
5. Ibid., p.111.
6. Ibid., p.111.
7. Ibid., p.115-6 for a detailed exposition of the dialectic, and Hyppolite: footnote 25 in the French
edition of Phenomenology of Spirit on p.163.
8. One will find later the difficulties of recognition almost in every instant in the relation of two selfconsciousnesses. Then, much later, in chapter VI (The Spirit) concerning evil and forgiveness:
this is what I am does not follow the response of a confession of the same kind. This judging
consciousness was not having any of it, etc., p.196 (French translation).
9. W. G. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, 413.
10. Op. cit.

11. Op. cit.

12. Op. cit., one finds the word dialectical in the Introduction.
13. See J. Hyppolites Gnse et structure de la phnomnologie de lesprit, Aubier, 1946, and then
the notes which accompany the French translation.
A. Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Cornell University Press, p.52-53.
A. Kojve, Introduction la lecture de Hegel, Gallimard, p.39.
A. Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, , p.43-44.
14. Ibid.,
15. J. Lacan, Ecrits, p.172.
16. J. Lacan, Le Seminaire, Livre XVII, p.202.
17. J. Lacan, LEtourdit, Scilicet No 4, p.9.
18. J. Lacan, Ecrits, p.234.
19. J. Lacan, Ecrits, p.140.
20. J. Lacan, Le Seminaire, Livre XX, p.246.
21. J. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p.26.
22. J. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p.80.
23. J. Lacan, Seminar I, p.221.
24. Ibid., p.222.
25. Ibid., p.222.
26. J. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p.99-100.
27. J. Lacan, Ecrits, p.345.
28. J. Lacan, Seminar II, p.71-72.
29. J. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p.292-293.
30. R. Feldstein, B. Fink, M. Jaanus (editors), Reading Seminar XI, p.261.
31. Ibid., p.262.
32. J. Lacan, Seminar XI, p.212.
33. Scilicet No 2/3, p.394-395.
34. J. Lacan, Le Seminaire, Livre XVII, p.11.
35. Ibid., p.49.
36. For example, Le Seminaire, Livre XVII, p.31, 61, Le Seminaire, Livre XVII, p.21.
37. Ibid., p. 38.
38. Ibid., p.34 and 35.
39. Ibid., p.38.
40. Ibid., p.38.
41. Parmenides, Fragment 1, line 31. (Consider as valid the diversity which demonstrates the
appearances).
42. J. Lacan, Le Seminaire XXI, RSI, seminar of 18 February 1975 in Ornicar? No 4, p.104.
43. Ibid., p.104.
44. W. H. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, 588.

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and then published in Quarto No 64, 1998, Brussels.
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